Saturday, August 30, 2008

For every axon, an equal and apposite re-axon.

(images by Craig Conley of the great Abecedarian Web Log. We've been lobbing words and images back at each other for over a month now. Nothing like a good lob for the lobes. The Tongue and Snake image above is one of Craig's awesome illustrations of a text from Hugh Thomas and my translations of Kafka parables.)

When I woke up this morning, I had this thought. The thought could connect to many other thoughts, but it was complete. Ready. Resonant. A mind tool.

The thought: ‘up.’

The thought could have been the notion of the colon in that previous sentence; it could have been that semi-colon at the beginning of this phrase (or the parenthetical) or it could have been ‘Shoe-turbid.’

It could have been a semi-colon on the chest of a formally dressed man from the past.

Or the imagined roundness of the tiny period at the end of this sentence.

Or the imaginary one in the middle of this sentence.

On its own, a semi-colon is a complete thought. It is a synapse: jumping from the axon of one thing to the dendrite of another. From the axon of the period to the dendrite of the comma.

A period is also a complete thought. It is a synapse: jumping from the axon of one thing back to the dendrite of that same thing. My mother was worried that I’d fall off the edge. Up.